Review; RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 11

Because apparently all I know what to write about anymore is drag and the Season 11 Queens Reveal was so messy, here’s a review about my thoughts. I’m going to cover the reveal, the runway and the trailer just so we have lots to talk about.

Let’s start at the worst and work our way up; the reveal. The reveal was filmed live, which is already ridiculously hard to time and coordinate. This showed, hard, with missed timings between co-hosts Aquaria and Adam Rippon. What’s even worse is that Adam, bless his soul, looked very intimidated in front of the camera and, as such, wasn’t able to properly interview the contestants. The first part of it was honestly a bit boring, with the contestants not able to really offer much because they were only being thrown the most basic questions. And then in comes the monstrous personality of Silky Nutmeg Ganache, a queen after mine own heart. She basically interviews herself and isn’t afraid of snatching the mic off of Adam. She single-handedly saved the Reveal. Next came Soju, who is basically a professional at this anyways, and she sets herself up very nicely getting in mentions of everything she does outside of Drag Race. The rest of the contestants kind of come and go after that, except for (of course) Vanessa Vanjie Mateo who is louder and prouder than ever. I’m not going to say anything more than I was rooting for her to go home first last season and I’m sad she won’t be doing the same thing again this season.

Before I get into the runway, I’m saying a moment of forgiveness to Aquaria. Someone set her up to literally embarrass every queen and she didn’t deserve that. She rightfully snapped on Twitter about it; Aquaria lives for drag and seeing her so angry about doing the Reveal really makes my heart hurt for her.

And now the runway. It’s like half of these girls haven’t been on a runway, or even seen previous ones. They kind of just walk up and down, not really giving anything in particular. If you look back even at season 10, the reveal runway has the girls at least dancing around to the music. The only person who really brings it in the season 11 runway is Shuga Cain, which is surprising but at the same time, it isn’t by much more than the rest of Queens. It just feels like the directions they gave them were “walk down this and look pretty” and nothing else, which just got boring. It’s so sad because ‘Category Is…’ is such a good dance track and not taking full advantage of it to show off all your talents is a huge mistake.

Finally the promo trailer. None of it really stands out from each other, except for Brooke Lynn Heights when she comes out en pointe. Apparently, Soju also added all the kicks in for herself and Ariel was given a new look, which does happen from time to time. What this doesn’t change is how messy this whole thing was. Instead of taking time to properly prepare a season on Drag Race and coordinate a cohesive launch, it feels like Drag Race has hit a machine-like status of pushing out a new season and then a new All-Stars season one after the other. As someone who loves the show I’m not directly opposed to that formula, but also I prefer quality over quantity. There’s always a point to be made about having a good-quality season planned, prepared and launched. This one just looks like it’ll be a messy one.